100 Meter Spring Reverb Makes Us Hear Satanic Voices

Spring reverb is something we’re used to hearing about when it comes to guitar amplifiers. It’s a coil spring stretched the length of the amp’s housing. One end is fed the guitar signal, with a pickup at the other to capture the output. But this spring reverb is on a much grander scale. [Jochem van Grieken] strung up 100 meters of coiled steel wire in a long hallway and the results sound a little bit evil.

A simple piezo element is used as a pickup to amplify the sound coming off of the spring. Above [Jochem] is using what looks like a jeweler’s saw to make some sound on the 3.5mm wire. It’s this portion of the video that sounds demonic to us. In the second half of the demonstration he strikes the wire with a ruler to produce the pew-pew effect from many a sci-fi movie.

This isn’t his first experiment with the concept, it’s just his largest. Also found after the break are a pair of links to his other installations.

This reminds me of an old delay line I saw once. I think the addition of some kind of feed back might be an interesting twist. Maybe with the option to inject sound.
If you could get it to resonate it would act like some kind of acoustic tesla coil :D
Now to find a way to generate a freqency high enough to make a tesla coil out of strait wire at optical frequencies (: it could make for some efficiant lighting (:

Maybe thats how they should power the space elevator, if they ever get round ro building it, match the cable to the earths resonant frequency.
All well and good until you draw too much current and the magnetosphere’s field collapses.

Im not sure about space elevators but I have tried injecting sound on one end and recording it with a piezo element on the other side. But with these kind of delay times it gets messy really quick. I will look into some kind of feedback mechanism, thanks for the tip.

And for all of you eager to try, the simplest and coolest way to experience this is to get a slinky and let it hang in free air while clamping it between your teeth. The sound travels through your jaw into year inner ear, believe me, it’s very impressive.

What do you mean? It IS a reverb… The piezo is connected directly to the amplifier driving the speakers, no external processing. In earlier versions I used a bucket to acoustically amplify the signal and it sounds exactly the same.